NAME

SYNOPSIS

DESCRIPTION

This module provides functions to percent-encode and percent-decode URI strings as
defined by RFC 3986. Percent-encoding URI's is informally called ``URI escaping''.
This is the terminology used by this module, which predates the formalization of the
terms by the RFC by several years.

A URI consists of a restricted set of characters. The restricted set
of characters consists of digits, letters, and a few graphic symbols
chosen from those common to most of the character encodings and input
facilities available to Internet users. They are made up of the
``unreserved'' and ``reserved'' character sets as defined in RFC 3986.

In addition, any byte (octet) can be represented in a URI by an escape
sequence: a triplet consisting of the character ``%'' followed by two
hexadecimal digits. A byte can also be represented directly by a
character, using the US-ASCII character for that octet.

Some of the characters are reserved for use as delimiters or as
part of certain URI components. These must be escaped if they are to
be treated as ordinary data. Read RFC 3986 for further details.

The functions provided (and exported by default) from this module are:

uri_escape( $string )

uri_escape( $string, $unsafe )

Replaces each unsafe character in the $string with the corresponding
escape sequence and returns the result. The $string argument should
be a string of bytes. The uri_escape() function will croak if given a
characters with code above 255. Use uri_escape_utf8() if you know you
have such chars or/and want chars in the 128 .. 255 range treated as
UTF-8.

The uri_escape() function takes an optional second argument that
overrides the set of characters that are to be escaped. The set is
specified as a string that can be used in a regular expression
character class (between [ ]). E.g.:

"\x00-\x1f\x7f-\xff" # all control and hi-bit characters
"a-z" # all lower case characters
"^A-Za-z" # everything not a letter

The default set of characters to be escaped is all those which are
not part of the "unreserved" character class shown above as well
as the reserved characters. I.e. the default is:

"^A-Za-z0-9\-\._~"

uri_escape_utf8( $string )

uri_escape_utf8( $string, $unsafe )

Works like uri_escape(), but will encode chars as UTF-8 before
escaping them. This makes this function able to deal with characters
with code above 255 in $string. Note that chars in the 128 .. 255
range will be escaped differently by this function compared to what
uri_escape() would. For chars in the 0 .. 127 range there is no
difference.

Equivalent to:

utf8::encode($string);
my $uri = uri_escape($string);

Note: JavaScript has a function called escape() that produces the
sequence ``%uXXXX'' for chars in the 256 .. 65535 range. This function
has really nothing to do with URI escaping but some folks got confused
since it ``does the right thing'' in the 0 .. 255 range. Because of
this you sometimes see ``URIs'' with these kind of escapes. The
JavaScript encodeURIComponent() function is similar to uri_escape_utf8().

uri_unescape($string,...)

Returns a string with each %XX sequence replaced with the actual byte
(octet).

This does the same as:

$string =~ s/%([0-9A-Fa-f]{2})/chr(hex($1))/eg;

but does not modify the string in-place as this RE would. Using the
uri_unescape() function instead of the RE might make the code look
cleaner and is a few characters less to type.

In a simple benchmark test I did,
calling the function (instead of the inline RE above) if a few chars
were unescaped was something like 40% slower, and something like 700% slower if none were. If
you are going to unescape a lot of times it might be a good idea to
inline the RE.

If the uri_unescape() function is passed multiple strings, then each
one is returned unescaped.

The module can also export the %escapes hash, which contains the
mapping from all 256 bytes to the corresponding escape codes. Lookup
in this hash is faster than evaluating "sprintf("%%%02X", ord($byte))"
each time.

SEE ALSO

URI

COPYRIGHT

Copyright 1995-2004 Gisle Aas.

This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify
it under the same terms as Perl itself.